practical reason
Free checklist

The 17 things we check in an ad account every morning.

Most money lost on ads goes quietly: a sold-out product still advertised, a price that changed, a link that broke. These are the checks we run every morning. You can do each one yourself.

Two pages, as a PDF. We use your email only for this. How we handle it.

What is inside

Seventeen checks, in the order we run them.

The PDF adds where to look for each one and what to do when it fails.

Money

  1. 01Divide yesterday’s shop sales by yesterday’s total ad spend. That is your real return.
  2. 02Check your return over the last seven days is above your break-even, worked out from your own margins and returns.
  3. 03Check each advertised product against its own break-even, after its own refunds.
  4. 04Put each platform’s claimed sales next to your real orders. When they disagree, trust the orders.
  5. 05Check this month’s spend so far against the ceiling you set for the month.

Stock and prices

  1. 06Check no live ad is sending people to something that is sold out.
  2. 07Check which advertised products will sell out within three weeks at today’s pace.
  3. 08Check every price quoted in an ad, including inside the image or video, matches your shop today.
  4. 09Check no ad, headline or sitelink still mentions a sale that has ended.

Delivery

  1. 10Open every ad link. Each should land on a working page, first time, with no chain of redirects.
  2. 11Look for ads marked disapproved or limited. They spend nothing and tell you nothing.
  3. 12Look for an old end date on a campaign or ad set that is quietly stopping it running.
  4. 13Check what each campaign spent yesterday against its budget. Spending far less is a warning too.
  5. 14Note which campaigns are still learning, and move no budget by more than about 20% in one step.

Audience, creative and tracking

  1. 15Check how often the same people see each ad. Above about three times, with clicks falling, the ad is tired.
  2. 16Check each ad set has enough budget for the ads in it: roughly £10 a day for each ad.
  3. 17Check your Meta pixel and server events still fire and roughly match your real orders.

Where these come from: the checks that run on a live retail ad account every morning, rewritten so you can do them by hand. The thresholds are rules of thumb from that account, not laws.

Or leave it to us

We run all 17, every morning, before you wake up.

Along with your orders, stock, margins and returns. Start with the free shop check, or see what the checks found for one retailer.

Run my free checkRead the case study